Monotheistic religions alone furnish the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, heretical tribunals, that breaking of idols and destruction of images of the gods, that razing of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi, which had looked on the sun 3,000 years: just because a jealous god had said, 'Thou shalt make no graven image.'

Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.

There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.

Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little.